I turned off the engine and stepped out on to the springy turf. Across the low valley was a sea of white tape that criss-crossed the untouched land, tied at intervals to pegs hammered into the ground. Someone was in the Dragonlands. Someone was already staking claims.

I heard a cheery whistling on the breeze and walked to the brow of a low hill, where I saw a small man wearing a brown suit and an unmistakable derby hat. It was Gordon van Gordon. He hadn’t been busy looking after his mother after all – he had been busy claiming as much of the Dragonlands as he could. He was, after all, my apprentice, and only a Dragonslayer or their apprentice may enter the Dragonlands. He was cheerfully banging claim stakes into the ground, and hadn’t noticed I was watching him.

‘Something you want to share, Gordon?’

He jumped as I spoke and looked up at me, but he didn’t seem too worried.

‘Not really.’

‘Let me see.’

He gave me one of the stakes he had been banging into the ground. There was an aluminium disc attached to each stake, and it was stamped with the name of the company Mr Trimble had been negotiating for earlier: The Consolidated Useful Stuff Land Development Corporation. Gordon had successfully claimed the land. The area enclosed within the named stakes legally belonged to ConStuff – or it would do, as soon as the Dragon was dead and the marker stones lost their power. Gordon had claimed a lot. As far as I could see there were marker tapes tied to stakes.

I shook my head sadly.

‘I trusted you, Gordon. Why all this?’

‘Sorry, Miss Strange, but this is strictly business. I like you as a person. You have many fine qualities that I admire. But you are out of time. You should have been born a century ago when values such as yours meant something.’

Gordon smiled. But it was a smile I hadn’t seen before. It was as though I was meeting a different person. The Gordon I knew, the friendly and helpful Dragonslayer’s apprentice, had never been real at all.

‘You had me fooled.’

‘Don’t beat yourself up over it,’ he said kindly, ‘we’ve been running Last Dragonslayer Drill for a number of years now.’

I frowned.

‘This was all planned?’

He knocked a peg in, wrapped a tape around it and walked off in the direction of a stream. I followed, more out of a sense of shocked disbelief than anything else.

‘We knew that Brian Spalding was expecting someone to replace him. He resisted all our attempts to get him to appoint an apprentice so we watched him, waiting for the time the new Dragonslayer would come and take his place. It just so happened that you chanced along on my shift.’

‘How long were you waiting?’